Lovecraft has always been a little problematical, with his pulpy origins and outrageous racism, yet weirdly compelling stories.

A while back, I dived into a big collection of his work, re-reading At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time.

Mountains is great, exciting yarn or explorers going further and further into the ruins of pre-human (and, as it turns out, of non-earthly origin) civilization, but Shadow is one of Lovecraft’s best. Comparatively long, it feels like it drags, but not in a bad way. In a piling on sort of way, where the accumulation of slow building unease and paranoia becomes nearly unbearable.

But what are to think of him? I can’t say. Should I stop reading him because of his not just slight racism, like the doddering grandfather who makes uncomfortable remarks about the Japanese and World War II every time there’s a kung fu movie on TV (he really can’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese), but thought the Asian girl you brought home was adorable, but rather full on Mississippi Burning-style racism? Maybe, but I won’t. Does that make me a bad person? A hypocritical person? I don’t know.

I read a surprising amount of Brian Rathbone’s Call of the Herald on my Nook while I was in Thailand before realizing that it was better to stop wasting my time than finish it just for the sake of finishing it. I’d bought it on spec because it was cheap and I thought I remembered reading something good about somewhere.

Well, either I misremembered or else whoever said good thing about it was horribly mistaken.

First of all, I’m pretty sure this is actually YA fiction. Nothing else can justify to the thinly drawn, bland characterizations and lack of a well imagined setting.

So, evil invaders into a peaceful land, blah blah blah, local girl develops super awesome magical powers, blah blah, and I don’t know what next because I didn’t finish it and I don’t care.

So, I borrowed the second book of Erikson’s Malazan Empire of the Fallen series from my local library. It’s good; it’s rather like Cook’s Black Company, in terms of being a magic heavy, grim sort of military fantasy.

However, even though there are something like eight more books to go, I think I’m done. I’m not sure I really care enough about the characters, which is as much to do with the fact that it’s been too long since I read the first book and my memory’s a little vague. Erikson packs these books with characters and I would have to read them at a pretty good pace to keep everything reasonably fresh in my mind and I’m just not prepared to take that step.

Honestly, even though author John Scalzi has become kind of a big deal in science fiction, I hadn’t intended to read this – and wouldn’t have had it not been available for $1.99 or some such amount.

It’s a solid read, with an old school, pulp feel (only with better writing and a pleasing lack of obvious sexism/racism) and I enjoyed it. The action sequences were few, but decent. It’s very much like those dusty books from the 40a, 50s, and 60s that I love discovering in used bookstores. But, let’s be honest. I’d rather read one of those, which offer an esoteric thrill of discovery/archaeology, if nothing else.

The premise of Old Man’s War is interesting, though underdeveloped (people on Earth are kind of trapped there unless, at age 75, they join a military for the colonies; except for the whole joining the military, that aspect of it reminded me of a series of Asimov books where tall, beautiful, intelligent ‘spacers’ who colonized the stars look down on the poor folks on Earth who are not allowed to migrate because we’re so icky. Asimov, however, went into the sociology of all this. Scalzi, at least here, does not.

I’ll read the sequel if it is cheap or it is at my local library branch.